Texas After Violence Project

May 19th’s Day of Digital Humanities 2015 (#DayofDH, #DayofDH2015) is over and done with, but I can’t resist the urge to participate for posterity! I love the concept behind this international project. Registered digital humanists everywhere document what they do in a work day, in order to crowd-source data that will be processed using digital humanities methods in order to provide us all with a better sense of what DH encompasses. It’s a DH feedback mechanism extraordinaire!

Even if it’s too late to provide a data point for the project, it’s important to make DH work visible. Although no two days in the life of a digital humanist are exactly alike, I would say that yesterday was pretty representative of my professional life these days. Here’s what I got up to:

Here’s my description of the workshop: “This interactive workshop will focus on how to incorporate digital archives into research and teaching on modernism. Participants will 1) learn about digital archives and digitization initiatives pertinent to modernist studies; 2) mine selected digital archives and databases for primary source materials that speak to their research interests; and 3) learn strategies for incorporating these archives into their teaching.”

Communicated with colleagues in the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium about logistics for making a recording of a recent TxDHC webinar on the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) publicly available on the TxDHC website. Matt Christy of Texas A&M has been the point of contact for the TxDHC website, while Jennifer Hecker of UT-Austin has been coordinating closed captioning for the webinar recording using Amara. Accessibility is one of the core values of the digital humanities, so we look forward to posting a video that is accessible to hearing-impaired users.

Screenshot of the landing page of the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium website.

Screenshot from the GLIFOS editing page on the Human Rights Documentation Initiative website.

In addition to the above, I wrote a slew of e-mails (naturally) and had some nice hallway chats with fellow library staff, including Head Research and Instruction Librarian Joan Parks, who clued me in to this webinar introduction to Native American primary source databases. All in all, it was an enchanting day of DH-related work and activities!

What did you do during Day of DH 2015? If you tweeted, blogged, or otherwise participated in Texas, consider logging in and linking as appropriate to this running list on the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium website. It would be great to get insights into a day in the life of DH across Texas.

The TAVP partners with the HRDI to make oral histories pertaining to the death penalty in Texas digitally available to the public. As a class, we digitally archived approximately 15 hours of oral history testimony.

In addition to regularly blogging, tweeting, and building independent digital projects using platforms such as Annotation Studio, Tiki-Toki, Omeka, and HistoryPin, our class transcribed 17 prison essays for the American Prison Writing Archive and digitally archived a whopping 15 hours of oral history testimonyfor the Texas After Violence Project. In this time- and labor-intensive enterprise, students took responsibility for transcribing, auditing, formatting, and synching transcripts with video for five oral history narrators whose stories are collected at the Human Rights Documentation Initiative. Students also created tables of contents and abstracts for the interviews, which will be made available to the public pending finalization by HRDI archivists.

I commend the students of English 10-714 for their openness to experimenting not only with new digital technologies, but also with traditional notions of genre and narrative. The multidisciplinary goals of the class–to deepen our understanding of how freedom, imprisonment, and criminal justice have been variously conceptualized in the U.S. imaginary–called for a broadly construed understanding of the “prison narrative.” While we encountered many texts that comport directly with the genre conventions of the prison narrative (including readings from Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in Americaedited by Doran Larson, and pieces archived at the American Prison Writing Archive), we also encountered texts that challenged us to expand our idea of what the “prison narrative” might be, to include ostensibly non-narrative texts as well as the perspectives of writers and narrators far outside prison walls. Poems from Guantanamo: The DetaineesSpeak, oral histories from family members of victims of crimes, the documentary Crime After Crimedirected by Yoav Potash, and speeches by Angela Davis enriched our discussions of the generic boundaries of the prison narrative. Over the course of the semester, we framed our humanities inquiry in terms of questions like these:

Explored collectively and comparatively, how do these multidisciplinary texts narrate shifting ideologies with regard to U.S. criminal justice?

Whether explicitly narrative or not, what stories do these texts tell about about how criminal justice policies and practices impact people and communities inside prisons and beyond?

What do these texts reveal about the power of narrative to establish, sustain, overturn, or transform widely held assumptions about prisons and the imprisoned?

One student wrote that reflecting on the semester, “I see narrative in everything that we have read and watched and listened to. I learned a great deal about how the narratives Americans are exposed to about imprisonment and punishment have a great impact on how we view prison — views that I saw in myself, and that have definitely been impacted the way that I think about punishment in general.” Another student remarked that our course readings “destroyed the dissociation that I have had with those that are incarcerated and rather humanized them.” Yet another student concluded that “the work of listening and contextualizing that needs to be done around crime… broadens the discourse around capital punishment by urging us to think about corporal and mental punishment, almost akin to death, perpetuated by prisons… While we need to fight for reform and specific policy changes, there needs to be a vast overhaul of this system.” These students’ reflections, as well as many others not cited here, evidence how effectively our course readings challenged students to confront their own assumptions, beliefs, and thoughts about future directions with regard to U.S. imprisonment practices.

In their thinking about the power of narratives to register and react to U.S. criminal justice, students cited a range of texts as favorites, but oral histories at the Texas After Violence Project and the Rule of Law Oral History Project reigned in the students’ appreciation. Students interacted with audiovisual oral histories using this Close Listening Worksheet as a basis for analysis. They also interacted with TAVP oral histories by transcribing, auditing, and archiving them for the Human Rights Documentation Initiative TAVP Collection. As one student remarked,

“Oral history interviews were my favorite types of texts to work with and analyze. I really liked being able to see a face to a narrative and hear the voice behind the story…. It was a way to get closer to the content and analyze it on many levels. I was able to draw different responses from these type of texts that I wouldn’t be able to draw from something in print.”

Another student agreed, commenting that the “oral history aspect of the project was very affecting…, and I am glad this class exposed me to oral history projects, as I was previously unfamiliar. Watching people talk about their own experiences and beliefs, being able to see them process their own thoughts, is powerful in a different way than a carefully crafted story or essay.” The student added that the Rule of Law Oral History Project provided him with a valuable access point to “the philosophy surrounding law,” since the project includes diverse perspectives from “experts, activists, psychologists, and those who have personally experienced extralegal detainment or torture.”

With regard to oral histories, yet another student put forth “two specific nuggets of knowledge I learned in class: new ways of close-reading (transcribing, auditing, etc.) and the activist power of narratives.” For this student and others, the values of interactive close-reading and community engagement were closely tied in our interactions with digital oral history collections.

Following are some further themes that emerged in student reflections on course learning outcomes, demonstrated with more quotes from their blog posts.

How digital archives, digital archiving practices, and digital tools introduced new ways of close-reading and enhanced interactivity with course texts and topics:

“Although we were already engaging with the texts in such an analytical way this course pushed us to a different level. Using digital technology to annotate, archive, respond to, and discuss texts we were thinking about the texts in so many different ways. All the different forms of digital technology gave us different insights to what we were working with and helped us communicate our thoughts about the texts with others.”

With reference to archiving TAVP oral histories and transcribing APWA essays: “This type of close reading deals with the narrative/text physically… obviously, for literature classes, reading is that physical activity, but often times it is hard to engage with a text and read every, single, word. But when transcribing, auditing, or syncing a narrative, it is almost necessary to overly pay attention to every word—therefore another way to close-read texts. Looking at texts and narratives by using digital technology in class, has been a valuable avenue to deal with texts in a new way.”

How working with digital tools and texts enriched our conception of narrative and shifted students’ relationships to narrative:

“Poetry, oral narratives, scholarly articles, and even documentaries are all some ways we’ve explored the prison narratives in our course this semester… When we think about a text we think about something in print or online that can be read but this course taught us to broaden the term “text” in such an interesting way…We focused on the content but also on the media that we received the text from.”

“All of the tools and texts we have worked with this semester have made me start thinking differently about the act of reading and listening. Reading is not a passive activity, as I had once thought. Putting my responses down on paper (or rather, a blog) made me realize just how much I reflected during the reading process. I was not simply taking in information; I was interpreting it and forming new information. The same goes with the act of listening. Transcribing and auditing another person’s words makes them seem like your own, which is an interesting feeling. As a reader and a listener, I have been able to understand an author or narrator’s point of view much more quickly and with a much more open mind than I did before this class… We are connecting not just to each other, but to the ideologies that surround us.”

“[T]ranscribing pieces [was] a deeply new thing for me. The first time I listened to the Jeff Hood interview [at the Texas After Violence Project], I found myself enjoying his story, questioning his motives, finding places where his activism plays into other systems of power that I have been taught about, and absorbing the story but not being changed by it. After auditing, and syncing this interview I found a new take on it entirely. The places that I would write off from his story because it doesn’t align with my experience (whether seeming unbelievable or merely not recognizable), in the end became the parts that really stretched me a lot… Normally, I would only listen to a long video such as this over and over again if I wanted to remember it, share it, somehow take ownership of it. But what I found with the Jeff Hood interview was that I engaged with the story not because I wanted to use it, but because it was a voice that mattered and it was my job to listen.”

How social media challenged student writers, enhanced community in our class, and connected us with communities beyond our class:

“Using Twitter as a productive and efficient way to respond to the “texts” we worked with made it really easy to attach other media aspects to what we were already talking about and add a more “real” feel to it all. We could join in conversation with current events and topics on Twitter and tie them into what we were thinking about in class.”

“While I enjoyed the use of a popular social media platform such as Twitter, I found it particularly challenging to narrow my thoughts down to 140 characters. This challenge made me think more carefully about each word and letter used in order to effectively and concisely make my point. I think it was very beneficial, however, to have all the thoughts in one place such as the feed. In other classes that require daily or weekly responses, it is usually for the professor’s benefit and is not shared with the rest of the class.”

“[A]t first I really disliked having to comment on weekly readings via Twitter, because of the extremely limited space, but eventually I realized that most of what I disliked was the way that the short format pushed me to very carefully consider my thoughts, and condense them into the best, purest form possible.”

How working with digital technologies and digital narratives opened up possibilities for advocacy, activism, and community engagement:

“Narratives are crucial aspects of activism. Reading someone’s story—being placed in someone’s metaphorical shoes by reading their work—creates a bond; and then this bond creates a meaningful connection for the person to the narrator. Therefore, I think that learning about injustices of the prison industrial complex through narratives like the TAVP [oral histories], the Rule of Law Oral History Project…, Fourth City: Essays from the Prisons in Americaand our other course texts—completely achieve this goal, of creating a bond with the reader.”

“The tools we have interacted with… have shown me the depth of accessibility for a wide variety of audiences that comes along with open air digital blogs and projects, and that is a necessary hinge of activism.”

Update, May 22, 2015: Course evaluations are in! Following are some of the problems, issues, and challenges that students identified in the class. Some of these were articulated in their blog posts as well, so I’ll synthesize them here:

The emotional component of the class. The controversial course topic, sensitive course material, and provocative voices and perspectives we encountered in course texts sometimes made for an emotionally charged classroom experience.

With the exception of the final project, in which students selected a digital platform from which to conduct a literary analysis, the digital skill-building did not always interact with the literary texts. Over the course of the semester, we learned Annotation Studio, Omeka, Tiki-Toki, and HistoryPin in preparation for the final project assignment. This, in addition to learning video-editing skills and the digital archiving software GLIFOS, was indeed a lot (probably too much) to cover, in light of our heavy reading load, regular social media contributions, and task sessions for the Texas After Violence Project and the American Prison Writing Archive. Several students suggested spending less time on skill-building, and more time independently applying selected digital tools to course texts.

Assessment. Assessment is a big issue in both digital humanities and community-engaged classrooms, and ours was both. While I provided consistent feedback to students in the form of individual responses to blog posts and tweets, project management e-mails and meetings in and out of class with regard to tasks for the TAVP and the APWA, an in-class digital project proposal workshop, one-on-one consultations on final digital projects, and in-depth written responses to final projects, I did not assign grades until the end of the class. For the most part, students responded well to this format. Our class had great momentum. Every student completed all requirements for the class, quite a number of them going well above and beyond. But some student evaluations indicated that the gradelessness of the class was a challenge.

I take seriously issues of assessment in a course where the work does not neatly correspond to a system of letter grades. The question of how to assess digital scholarship and community-engaged learning looms large at this juncture in higher ed. Is it a matter of channeling student work into grade categories no matter what and however uneasily? Is it a matter of front-loading the class with extensive discussion about how their work will be valued and evaluated outside of the traditional grading system? What are the best strategies for providing students with the feedback they need to learn and succeed in the digital humanities/community-engaged classroom? This semester was undoubtedly a valuable experiment for me as an educator when it comes to assessment. The students’ feedback has provided me with a lot of important food for thought, and I look forward to implementing their suggestions in future teaching.

Screenshot from the GLIFOS page for a TAVP interview with Ireland Beazley. Students will input metadata on editing pages like this one in order to make interviews available on the public page of the HRDI.

Student responses to the GLIFOS orientation on our class blog highlighted the centrality of digital archiving tasks to our class’s commitment to community engagement. In one post, titled “An Out-Of-This-Classroom Experience,” a student commented, “This is a chance for me to gain valuable skills about real-life computer technology. More than that, I am most excited about the chance to do something substantial for an organization outside of an academic setting.” Another student pointed out that while participating in digital archiving tasks advances the TAVP mission, just as importantly, these tasks enhance liberal arts education:

“Even though the main goal of working with the TAVP is to help a non-profit and engage in activism, which I personally believe is central to feminist studies, as students, when we transcribe or create a table of contents for the video, we are better able to engage, critically think, and basically have a more meaningful interaction with the TAVP videos.”

Both student blog contributors mentioned the insights they are gaining into the profound “ripple effects” of the death penalty throughout Texas communities. One student blogged that at this point in the class’s work with the TAVP,

“I have been able to expand my perceived web of peoples affected by the death penalty. First it starts with the victim and the person sentenced, then to the family of the victim, then extending towards the perpetrator’s family, next to the lawyers on both sides of the case, after that the jurors of the case, and somewhere in between, the friends of the victim/perpetrator and witnesses of the crime. I hope that my understanding of this web continues to expand through more experiences with the TAVP.”

Another student blogger echoed this sentiment:

“I am most excited about working with the Texas After Violence Project because of the vast array of perspectives they collect regarding the death penalty… Since I am interested in a career in the field of law, whether that be as a lawyer or a law enforcement agent, I am excited to be able to learn concrete ways the legal system effects not only those incarcerated but the ripple effect it has on family and friends as well.”

In addition to completing the GLIFOS orientation, students also engaged with the TAVP this past week by contributing to a class HistoryPin gallery featuring selected clips from TAVP oral history interviews. You can explore our gallery here.

Students selected one oral history to listen to this week, and completed this Close Listening Worksheet as they listened. Using the results of these worksheets to compose blog posts, students reflected on the interviews, raised important questions, and made insightful observations about how the interviews connect with course readings. Since the TAVP interviews represent a range of positions on the death penalty, one student remarked,

“Dismissing people based on their stance on capital punishment is not objective. Although anyone can agree or disagree with her it is important to listen to anyone and everyone’s story in a way that allows for judgement to take the backseat.”

Screenshot from TAVP interview with Iliana Lopez, archived at the HRDI

Another student, who listened to an interview with Iliana López (see screenshot above), noted that this interview reinforces the importance of oral history at large.

“I found Illiana’s lived experiences accurately mapped out why restorative justice can be a powerful alternative to the responses of traditional law enforcement and courts… Her experience demonstrates the need to listen and share oral narratives; the stories of people we may not otherwise listen to, or who we may only hear through the filter of a criminal justice system that is more set on dehumanizing punishment rather than restorative conversation.”

Yet another student concluded, “It is difficult to learn to bear witness to injustice without either finding justice in it or turning yourself off. But witnessing is without question important.”

This is a significant point to which I would like to return over the course of our class discussions this semester. Why is it important that we bear witness to injustice by engaging with oral histories? What do we do with our emotions when listening to troubling narratives? What are some productive ways in which we can process and respond to the stories of injustice we’re encountering?

I’m looking forward to an exciting semester working with Southwestern University undergrads on projects involving a host of digital archives initiatives: the Digital Public Library of America, the Human Rights Documentation Initiative, and the Rule of Law Oral History Project, to name just a few. The beginning of the semester is a good time to evaluate teaching resources that have worked well in the past and think about incorporating new ones. Inspired by my colleague and fellow Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoc Monica Mercado’s (@monicalmercado) Twitter appeal this morning on behalf of her independent study undergrads–“does anyone have an article they like on *doing* archival research?”–I’ve collected here my go-to resources for facilitating undergraduate engagement with archives. I developed these resources with the support of the Bridging Disciplines Programs at UT-Austin in 2013, when I was still a wee graduate student. I’m happy to report that I still find them useful for getting everyone (students and faculty) on the same page about what archives are and how undergrads can orient themselves to the archival research task.

Archival Artifact Analysis Worksheet. This basic worksheet challenges students to make analytical observations about a selected archival object. It also asks students to think about next steps for researching context, thus initiating the process of identifying secondary sources to contextualize primary sources.

Tu-Uyen Nguyen, TAVP intern extraordinaire, will graduate this spring with majors in Asian American Studies and Classics

Ten days after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Aryan Brotherhood member Mark Stroman attempted to kill three men he believed were terrorists: Vasudev Patel, Waqar Hasan, and Rais Bhuiyan. Only Bhuiyan survived to become a spokesperson against Islamophobia and the racial ignorance it represents. Ten years later when Stroman was issued the death penalty, Bhuiyan sued Texas Governor Rick Perry to stop Stroman’s execution. When Rais Bhuiyan survived Mark Stroman’s bullets, I was in in the fifth grade and without a clue that a decade later, I would be transcribing his interview with the Texas After Violence Project. When Stroman was executed, I was a junior at UT starting my Asian American Studies coursework as my third major. While I have only finished transcribing two of the eight hours of Bhuiyan’s interview, it has already taught me meaningful historical, educational, and personal lessons.

From Bhuiyan’s oral history interview, we learn a lot about Bhuiyan’s middle-class family experience in Bangladesh: his childhood memories of shaking mango trees during the rainy season to gather their fruit, and his coming of age in the nation’s top military school. Military school was foundational to Bhuiyan’s aspirations as a young man deciding his life path, just like the thousands of students at UT Austin are deciding their own future. Bhuiyan’s first dream to be a pilot in the Bangladeshi Air Force changed to a “dream to come to U.S. for higher education and to experience the American Dream and see the world.” Bhuiyan talks about what the American Dream is to him and how racial representation emblematizes the progress the U.S. has made:

“This is a free country where whatever you want to be, you can be… If you dream for it, you go for it, and you work hard, and you know, you achieve your goal. And you will lead a free life, you have the freedom of speech, you have the freedom of – expressing yourself. Whatever you want to be, you can be that. And our presence is an example of that. Who thought that within sixty years of segregation that there would be a black man in the White House, right?”

Bhuiyan’s remarks resonate with many of the narratives, images, and concepts of the American Dream I have encountered in my Asian American Studies coursework, pertaining to war, diaspora, labor migrations, and immigration exclusions and reform. Rais Bhuiyan is one individual whose perspective demonstrates how both Americans and people abroad understand the American Dream.

For me, as a student and future teacher, the implications of working with the Bhuiyan interview are both academic and personal. My Asian American Studies major provides me with a critical framework for exploring our shared experiences as Americans encountering race, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability, and other identity features that influence our individual and collective agency. As I continue to transcribe Bhuiyan’s interview with the Texas After Violence Project, I will be reflecting on the shooting incident that brought Bhuiyan as a Muslim American in contact with a white supremacist. I will be learning how Stroman learned about peace and acceptance from Bhuiyan’s advocacy against his execution. I will learn more about Bhuiyan’s personal philosophy against the death penalty and his perspective on our community as human individuals rather than simply criminals and victims. By learning about Bhuiyan’s experience and knowledge as it is represented in the TAVP archive, I am gaining a deeper understanding of the American dream, ways of remembering 9/11, and how to negotiate the death penalty as a Texan and an American.

Rebecca Lorins, Acting Director of the TAVP and organizer of the Amplify Archives event, kicked off the discussion by welcoming the audience and providing some background on the purpose and operations of the TAVP, which aims to collect and archive oral histories that reflect how the death penalty affects communities throughout Texas. Kathryn Darnall, Graduate Research Assistant, followed up Rebecca’s remarks with an explanation of the HRDI’s mission to digitally preserve the archives of social justice movements.

Next, Naomi Paik, Professor of American Studies and Asian American Studies at UT, reflected on her experiences teaching “American Studies 370: Race, Memory, Violence” during Spring of 2012.

Dr. Paik reflects on her course “AMS 370: Race, Memory, and Violence”

Dr. Paik’s course description reads as follows: “This interdisciplinary course examines how processes of racial formation and histories of racial violence shape knowledge production about the past in both historical narratives and in collective and individual memory. We will consider how narratives of the past are produced—from the selection of facts, their assemblage into archives, and creation of historical stories from the archives, as well as in the living and recorded memories of witnesses to the past. ”

Dr. Paik described how the TAVP archives anchored a course unit on race and U.S. imprisonment regimes. In consultation with Rebecca Lorins, she selected several TAVP oral history interviews representing multiple divergent perspectives on and experiences with the death penalty. Working in small groups, students analyzed the archives in terms of how they interacted with prevailing histories and assumptions about capital punishment in the U.S. Dr. Paik emphasized how powerful it is for UT students to engage with archives that are so closely tied to Texas state and regional history.

Following Dr. Paik’s remarks, I said a few words about my role as an intermediary between UT and the TAVP as an Austin community organization.

Charlotte Nunes discusses her role facilitating the BDP-TAVP internship experience

I have a long-standing relationship with Rebecca Lorins and the TAVP since I worked as a Graduate Assistant for the Bridging Disciplines Program (BDP), an interdisciplinary certificate program at UT. Over the years, the TAVP has hosted several undergraduate interns from the BDP, and Rebecca was a fantastic resource and collaborator as I pursued a project to support BDP interns by creating workshops and other resources on effective internship practices and responsible community engagement. When I took on co-Chairing responsibilities for the Human Rights and Archives Working Group in Fall 2013, Rebecca and I agreed that the time was right to mobilize a project that would offer BDP interns meaningful skill-building opportunities while substantively advancing the digital archiving mission of the TAVP. We circulated this call for interns, and I personally recruited several BDP students I thought might appreciate the opportunity.

Our recruitment efforts yielded a team of five stellar interns, all of whom have demonstrated exemplary commitment to our semester-long digital archiving project. Rebecca does the vast majority of the supervising work; however, we agree that my role serving as an intermediary between the TAVP and the BDP, and offering supervisory support to Rebecca (for example, I respond to blog posts, edit interns’ written work, and facilitate reading discussions on archival theory and practice), is part of what makes this such a functional university-community engagement project. This intermediary-consultant model is very effective at facilitating undergraduate engagement with archival materials. Looking to the future, I think that creating these types of consultant positions for graduate students could offer great professionalization opportunities. (Hmm… possible category of grant funding??)

The panel concluded with inspiring contributions from the TAVP intern team.

Jordan Weber, Tu-Uyen Nguyen, Lillie Leone, Sharla Biefeld, and Jessica Rubio discussed how the internship is connecting with their undergraduate education. Tu-Uyen shared how transcribing and archiving an interview with Rais Bhuiyan, a Bangladeshi-American who survived a murder attempt, is enriching her Asian American Studies minor. Lillie discussed how the hands-on, skill-building aspect of the internship complements and enhances what she’s learning in UT classrooms. Several of the students talked about how the internship has illuminated the definition and potential of oral history as a category of knowledge production and transmission.

A big thank you to all the panel participants and audience members for a fascinating discussion!